Coursera Expands Reach Into Russia

Coursera, a U.S.-based online education site, plans to reach its already thriving Russian audience by translating its material into Russian. The California-based firm, which has 5 million registered users, is cooperating with the Russian company ABBYY Language Services, which will use crowdsourcing to translate the courses. Coursera, founded in 2012 by Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, will translate their courses into Russian as part of a mass campaign to translate their material into different languages. Their site follows the idea of MOOC — massive open online courses — which means it gives access to different courses for free. The company charges only for issuing certificates to students and for certifying different courses.